Category: My stories

Ice Cream Truck

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Explosions are ripping apart the skyline of the city, but the ice cream truck rolls on.
No music is playing, but not because the driver doesn’t want to be targeted. Those who would destroy his truck are hundreds of miles away from hearing it, manning the missile batteries and piloting the drones which unleash the death around him.
No, the music is off because there is no ice cream today.
The coolers are full, sure, but they are packed with the corpses of his neighbors.
He figured as long as the bombs were falling, why not settle a few scores?

The Zombietron is not a toy

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Attorneys no longer have to worry about their witnesses turning up dead.
Now you can just stick the witness or victim in one end of the Zombietron, pour in a teaspoon of nanobots, and let them soak in the machine overnight.
Sure, they reek like a latrine pit full of rotten meat, but functional and lucid zombies are admissible as evidence.
The worst part of the process is watching them die again. I wonder if they suffer.
So, what happens when you put a living person in the Zombietron?
I don’t know.
Hey, let’s grab a bum and find out.

Midnight in Munich

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It’s midnight in Munich.
There’s opera singers on every street corner, belting out arias for spare change.
Give ’em five euros and they’ll watch your car all night long.
They say it deters crime. And the tourists dig it, too.
I don’t. All this racket gives me a nasty headache.
Besides, there’s too many streets and not enough opera singers, so they have to deploy understudies and amateurs to fill the gaps.
I liked it better when we had cops.
Now hand over your wallet, American.
Forget the cash… I just want to see if there’s an aspirin in it.

MVP

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What was that about there’s no such thing as bad publicity?
We bid six million dollars on the sponsorship rights for the official truck of baseball. For that, we got to hand the keys of a shiny new truck to the All-Star MVP.
He smiles nice and wide.
I swear, as God as my witness, we didn’t know that the guy didn’t know how to drive.
Five minutes later, we hear screams. He’s run over a kid in the parking lot and smashed the truck into a light pole.
No seatbelt, and the airbags failed.
He smiles, bloody and gap-toothed.

By The Barrel

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“Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel,” slurred Mark Twain, staggering drunkenly in the street.
“Certainly, sir,” said the police officer. “But I think you’ve had too much to drink.”
“That’s because I buy wine by the barrel,” said Mark Twain, falling flat on his face in the dirt.
The officer dragged Twain back to the hotel lobby, and that’s when the newspaper office exploded.
“Great Scot!” shouted the cop.
“I also buy black powder by the barrel,” mumbled Twain. “That’ll teach the son of a bitch to be late paying me for my articles.”

El Tocino-Envuelto

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Where Pizarro failed, Sir Walter swore he’d succeed.
He’d find El Dorado, the legendary City of Gold!
Through all of his expeditions, he never did find El Dorado.
But he was quite fond of a town called El Tocino-Envuelto, which roughly translates to The Bacon-Wrapped One.
Where El Dorado was supposedly paved with gold, the streets of Tocino-Envuelto were paved with pork.
The Spanish outpost of San Thome was rumored to have the best applesauce in the New World. Raleigh craved it for his pork chops.
It would ultimately be his son’s death and, by the headsman’s axe, his undoing.

The Finisher

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They call us Finishers.
When the subject has nothing more of use to give, we finish them off.
Now and then, something of use comes out, like a final drop of lemon juice from a squeezed and pulverized lemon.
We don’t care. We’re there to punish, not interrogate.
Some administrator got it in their head that Finishers should be licensed medical practitioners. Never mind that we have one purpose: to cause harm. We cannot take the Hippocratic Oath.
That administrator vanished the other day.
Want to hear a tape of them screaming, or would you like to see their tongue?

And baby makes… um… three?

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Alberto was the first guy to admit he wasn’t good at math.
Jenny, on the other hand, refused to admit it.
At first, they tried to bribe her with candy to get her to admit she wasn’t good at math. But Jenny would have none of that. She insisted she was good at math.
Before they could finish with Jenny, she got knocked up. Seems that she and Alberto used the rhythm method and… well, you know where this is going. Carry the three and… whoops!
They’ve got three or four kids now. Maybe five. Depends on who you ask.

The Dollar Coin Dolly

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I hate to burst your bubble, but Sacagawea was no guide or translator.
She was just a common filthy street whore.
Lewis and Clark bought her off of that Charbonneau guy, dressed her up like an Indian, and “explored” her rotten every mile of the Missouri and back.
The whole “Indian Guide” story? Just a ruse for getting the government to pick up the expense.
Jean Baptiste was a wooden doll, meant to fool the natives into thinking Lewis and Clark were civilized folk.
It’s in the Smithsonian, unless they incinerated it to keep the real story from getting out.

The Wife

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The old man’s lawyers called his wife.
“We’re on vacation,” growled the wife.
“We’re concerned,” said the lawyers. “Now that he’s been found guilty, the fine your husband faces is disastrously large.”
“Are my assets safe?” asked the wife.
“No,” said the lawyers. “What’s yours is his. Everything goes.”
The wife pondered. “Is there a way out of this?”
“He’s guilty, but not sentenced,” said the lawyers. “If he dies before sentencing, the judgment vanishes.”
“And you get paid,” said the wife.
They gave her sugar pills. She gave them his heart medication.
She woke up a very rich widow.